Copyright, Piracy, and Ethics
Situation One:
"Mrs. Hamer is tutoring for the functional writing test out of a copyrighted series of workbooks from Houghton Mifflin. He has 27 students but only 20 books were purchased for his class. The same material is available at the Houghton Mifflin webpage. She prints enough pages for her kids each morning for today’s class."
This situation could be considered a copyright infringement if the school did not own those 20 copies already. The rule is that you can make one copy for every copy you own. So since he has 20 books and only needs 7 more then it is fine for him to copy the worksheets that he needs. It is a shame that the school did not provide him with enough workbooks to begin with but sometimes you have to make adjustments where needed.
Situation Two:
"Mr. Jamweimer, the parent of one of our most intellectual students, has paid to download a wonderful computer software program for his little Einstein. Mr. Jamweimer wants "our school" to be the best and sends a copy of the downloaded file to be used by the students on the computers at school. P.S. all of the kids use it and win Nobel Prizes in science, literature, physics, chemistry, and playground."
Parent donations often times provide pieces to their child’s education that could otherwise not be provided. It is great that Mr. Jamweimer is interested in providing this program for his child and if it was just used in his home there would be no copyright infringements but when you take a program like that and provide it for public use that’s when problems occur. Making multiple copies of a program is illegal. If the school were to own the program then they would be able to use it in the classroom. One suggestion for Mr. Jamweimer would be to buy enough copies of the program for all the students and donate the copies to the school or provide the money for the school to buy products such as more software programs. Also if the school were to buy the program they could possibly get a discounted price by buying them in bulk. This might be more expensive but in the long run it is better for both the students and the parent involved. It is fantastic that the students win Nobel Prizes but if they were to use the program illegally then they would not be winning justly. Students need to be taught the guidelines for copyright infringements so that they can have the knowledge of what is right and what is wrong when it comes to using other peoples work.